Today's award goes to the Los Angeles Police Department, and one officer in particular.
The incident’s details were described in a lawsuit filed by the owners of a Los Angeles medical imaging center, who allege that their business was wrongly targeted by LAPD during a raid in October 2023.
. . .
The plaintiffs say the officers’ behavior was “nothing short of a disorganized circus, with no apparent rules, procedures, or even a hint of coordination.”
At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said. The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine. MRI machines are tube-shaped scanners that use incredibly strong magnetic fields to create images of the brain, bones, joints and other internal organs.
An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.
There's more at the link.
I don't know the cost of restoring and reactivating the MRI unit, but it's got to run into tens of thousands of dollars, given the price of helium and hourly rates for specialist technician assistance. To add insult to injury, no criminal activity or other evidence was found at the clinic.
I've had MRI's done in the past, and always - always - the technicians have warned me ahead of time not to take any metal object with me into the room. It's a very real danger. It's literally killed people before. I think that cop was very fortunate that his rifle didn't discharge as a result of being snatched out of his hands like that.
As for the fruitless raid, and the antics of the officers (all captured on video by the clinic's security system) . . . when did professionalism cease to be a requirement for LAPD's officers?
Peter
20 comments:
And the rest of us are very *unfortunate* that the strap wasn't sufficiently secure to decapitate or break the neck of officer jackass, ridding us of one more tyrannical imbecile. Such a pity. Nothing of value would have been lost.
I read that article - the medical office was raided because their high electricity bills led some idiot to suspect them of being an illegal grow house.
Morons.
The pigs cannot grok that marijuana is becoming legal. They wail and whine that making it legal makes their jobs harder. Just like they did about the Miranda warning.
There is something wrong with that story. An MRI is an electromagnet. It's not just magnetic all the time. The cop had to have walked in while a scan was underway for that to have happened. If that's true then the cop is an even bigger idiot than the story suggests. If it's not the case then something else happened. Very strange.
duh: MRI machine
I'm on the "No MRIs for you" list because an ear implant might possibly be the wrong type of stainless steel and thus magnetic. My research showed that about 250 of the wrong type (out of thousands) were out in the wild when I had my procedure (supposedly all the affected patients were informed), but without the 30 year old documentation, the MRI honchos won't take the risk. (My wife said she'd be quite angry if I got myself killed by an MRI machine. Not sure how she'd kill me again, but I wasn't going to ask.)
I have a vague recollection that every handgun that has been grabbed by an MRI unit has discharged when it hit the machine. Up 'til now, I've never heard of someone stupid enough to take a long gun near one.
"when did professionalism cease to be a requirement for LAPD's officers?"
Professionalism has not been a requirement for police officers since about 1980. Maybe even before then.....All that mattered was dominance and Officer Safety. per their training.
Your life, or the safety of the public no longer matter, not the Constitution nor the property damage they do...it's all covered under "Qualified Immunity".
Biggest criminal gang in the world.
As I vaguely recall from my high school days on the outer fringes of LA over 50 years ago, the word was that you were better off with LA Sheriff than LAPD. LAPD would simply shoot you when, in the same circumstances, the sheriff department would take you to jail.
Responding to Mikey at 11:22AM: you are sadly misinformed as to the nature of MRI systems. I'm a retired field engineer who worked with MRI for many years. A standard full-size MRI is an electromagnet, but it can't be just turned off with a switch. The MR coils are superconductors as long as they're kept in the area of 4 degrees Kelvin (-452 degrees F); that is accomplished by submerging them in a liquid helium vessel. Once the magnet is ramped up, power supplies are taken away and it remains a magnet as long as cryo remains stable. That's the only way it's economically feasible to operate a magnet that strong.
That field is unimaginably strong and it's very dangerous to bring ferrous objects into the field; once that object is captured it will move to the manget so fast you can't see it, and you don't want to be between it and the magnet. There are videos on Youtube that show what happens when objects are captured.
What the officer did was hit the MRU (magnet rundown unit); that turns on heaters within the cryo vessel, and that causes a quench -- all the helium boils off rapidly. Ideally the expanding gas (helium increases in volume over 700 times as it flashes from its liquid state) will escape through a vent stack permanently attached to the magnet to carry it outside. Once a magnet quenches it's going to be a week or so getting it back online, and that's going to be very expensive. And that's so if the pressure vessel can be isolated from atmosphere in a timely fashion. It'll have to be refilled -- expensively -- and power supplies will have to be brought in to ramp up and calibrate the system. Basically, it has to be re-installed.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but few folks have any idea how complex these things are. Nor do they have any appreciation for how strong and dangerous a magnetic field of that magnitude really is. You can't see the field, and you won't know it's there until it grabs whatever ferrous item you might have. People have been killed by items captured by that field.
Hope that helps.
Goatroper
I was told that as a person who held weld-coupons to test spot-weld machines, that the amount of weld expulsion that lodged beneath my skin made me a no-go for MRIs. I have extra lumps-and-bumps on my body. Having a chunk of skin ripped out of the ham of your thumb would be painful but not a big deal. Having a pocket of steel pebbles ripping through your eyeball would be a problem.
That's not true- the magnet IS "on" all the time even when scans aren't being done. It's a big deal to take down the magnet and turn it off, most MRI machines go for years at a time without the magnet being turned off.
(Le sigh) No, it isn't. Qualified Immunity does not apply to actions that a reasonable officer would know were unconstitutional. Furthermore, qualified immunity only applies to the officer in question--it does not apply to the organization for which they work.
So, forex: Officer Otto uses force badly. The victim sues him. Otto claims qualified immunity. One of two things happens: Either the courts find that Otto should have known that what he did was unconstitutional, in which case he is personally liable, or they find that while what he did was unconstitutional there was no reason for him to have known that, in which case the defendant is now the governing body he worked for.
Probably twenty or more years ago, I worked on an MRI monitoring system that would call out via modem when the MRI system it was monitoring lost power. Back then, we were told that if the pressure relief membrane burst, it would take at least a week and cost $50,000 to get the MRI system operational again. I don't know how the cost was divided between the helium itself and sterilizing and degassing the helium chamber.
Goatroper, above, is absolutely correct. I was the supervising electrician on a GE Medical Systems 1.5Tesla mri install for Austin Radiological Associates some thirty years ago. I must admit I took a great deal of pleasure in forbidding access by the Austin electrical inspector to the shielded room after the magnet was installed and ramped up to field. After telling him about the magnetic field, he satisfied himself with a look through the shielded observation window, conceded that he had no idea what i was talking about, and signed off on the job.
rick m
And here I made my living playing with nano- and pico-Tesla equipment
When growing up in LA in the 70s, I remember playing Cops & Robbers and commonly saying "Bang! Bang! Halt! Police!"
Now that's interesting. What kind of equipment was that?
Goatroper
When?
About 1975, if you're counting.
With mandatory federal hiring consent decrees.
The entire department became thorough-going @$$-clowns by the 1980s.
This incident is simply the residue of 40 years' planned destruction.
The extras who play cops on shows like The Rookie or Southland, working as minimum-wage background actors, are generally about twice as competent as most beat cops in L.A., and about 9 times more competent than the department's senior management.
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